“There is a popular argument that people don’t need an AR-15 to hunt. I can argue that the vast majority of people don’t need a car. We have public transportation. After all “cars,” not the drivers, kill on average 37,000 people a year and disable or injure millions more.”
Rhetoric claiming that an AR-15 is an assault rifle is an ignorant mischaracterization of the weapon. The fact is, it isn’t a military weapon at all, and cannot be used during U.S. military operations.
Mostly this mischaracterization is due to fear and no understanding of weapons or ballistics, or it comes from a misguided definition of an assault rifle put out by the U.S. Army in the 1990s.
The M16, which the AR-15 resembles, and A4 are not used exclusively to conduct assaults. A soldier standing post with one of these weapons, at a forward operating base, does so as a defensive measure. Soldiers conducting security patrols also employ them for defensive purposes. The list of defensive uses for these weapons can go on and on.
So, too, could the list of offensive operations, to include assaults. Several other weapons are usually employed during both defensive and offensive operations and are valued more, like light and heavy machine guns. I would rather one of my Marines sling his rifle on his back to ensure a machine gun stays in the fight than for him to ignore an idle machine gun in favor of his rifle, because the machine gun is much more effective than a so-called “assault” rifle.
by Michael Schoenfeld
